Which Prisoners Call The Sky
by Signy1
Summary: Long, long after the stalags were abandoned, long after World War II had become a matter for history books and old men's memories, an ex-POW, when asked what he had done during the war, looked down at his granddaughter and realized that he didn't quite have a ready answer. Truth is a slippery, elusive thing.


"Grandpa?"

"What is it, sweetie?"

"We were learning about World War II in school today. Were you in the war?"

The old man nodded, because he wasn't sure he could trust his voice.

The little girl clambered onto the couch next to him, snuggled close. "Wow! That must have been really scary. Were you in the army?"

"No. The Air Corps," he said, and found a smile. "Your grandpa was on a great big plane that dropped bombs on the Kr—on the Germans." Well, it was true. He had served on a bomber. Briefly.

She bounced happily. "Wow. I didn't know you flew an airplane."

"Well, actually, I didn't, but I was on the crew," he said. "Our pilot was a guy named Captain Sterne, but he didn't live up to his name. He was about the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet. We would have followed him int… we would have followed him anywhere."

"Can I meet him someday?"

"No, sweetie. He was killed during the war." He looked away, trying not to remember bailing out of the crippled plane. How the parachutes had snapped open, one by one, like flowers in springtime, wafting them down to earth. How the goddamned Krauts had kept firing. How few of them had made it all the way to the ground in one piece. What some of those pieces had looked like. "My plane was shot down. I had to jump out with a parachute."

Her eyes widened. "Did you get a medal?"

"I got a special badge. People who jumped out of broken planes like I did, we're in the 'Caterpillar Club.' I still have the pin put away somewhere."

"The… Caterpillar Club? They didn't tell us about that at school!" She beamed proudly. "You're really brave, Grandpa."

He forced another smile. "Thanks, sweetie." Please let that be the end of it, he prayed. Please don't let her ask the next ques—

"And then what happened? What did you do after that?"

So much for that little hope. "Well, sweetie… I was captured by the Germans," he said.

Her horrified expression didn't help him keep his composure. "The _Nazis_ got you? What… what did they do?"

"Oh, nothing too bad," he lied. "There are important rules, called the Geneva Convention, about how they had to treat POWs. They really just wanted to make sure that we couldn't get back to our own armies, so they kept us in special camps called 'Luftstalags' until the end of the war."

"Were you scared?"

"A little," he admitted. "But I told you; they weren't allowed to be too mean to us. Mostly, it was just really boring."

She nodded, accepting that. "So you were in the Loof… the Loostell… the camp, through the whole war?"

"Not the _whole_ war. Just some of it."

"Oh," she said. "What was it like?

"The food wasn't nearly as good as your grandma's cooking, and our… cabins… weren't all that comfy, but like I told you, most of the time it was just dull. There wasn't much to do except wait for the war to finish so we could go home."

She looked a bit disappointed at that anticlimax of an ending. He bit his lip, then put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a little hug. "Can I tell you a secret, sweetheart?"

That perked her up in an instant. "Yeah! What is it?"

"Well, that Luftstalag I was in? It wasn't like any other camp in the world," he said confidentially. "It wasn't just an ordinary camp, and we weren't just ordinary POWs. We had a top secret mission… so if I tell you, you can't ever tell anyone else, okay?"

"No one? Not ever?" She looked worried. "Not even Mom and Dad?"

"You can, if you want. They already know all about it," he reassured her. "So does your grandma. I meant anyone outside the family—your friends, or your teachers, or anyone else. Is that a deal?"

"Yes. I promise not to tell. Cross my heart and hope to die," she said, nodding importantly.

"Okay," he said. "The real truth is that we were spies, and we only stayed in that camp because it was the best way for us to hide in plain sight. We were right in the middle of Germany, right where we could learn all kinds of enemy secrets. It was our job to steal important enemy plans and send them back to Allied Headquarters. If you know what the bad guy is going to do before he does it… well, it makes it a lot easier to plan out how to stop him, right?"

Her eyes were like saucers. She nodded, enthralled.

"And that wasn't all we did. Oh, heck no! Sometimes we would sneak out in the middle of the night, all dressed in black so we'd blend into the shadows. And we'd plant bombs to blow up bridges or train tracks, so the Kr-Germans had to keep running back and building new ones if they wanted to be able to go anywhere at all. And best of all, we helped people who wanted to live in a free country to get safely out of Germany. All kinds of people. There were ordinary flyers, just like us, whose planes had crashed, and we got them back to their bases. And there were scientists who didn't want to help the Nazis; they wanted to make discoveries for the good guys, instead. And lots of other people, too." He stopped, out of breath.

"Grandpa, you must be the bravest man in the world."

"Oh, I wasn't the only one who was doing whatever he could to help win the war," he told her. "All of us did. My friends and I… well, maybe some of what we were doing was kind of dangerous, but I'll tell you something important, and I don't want you to ever forget it." He gave her a serious look, waited for her to nod.

"This is the real secret. Being part of a team, all working together… there's not much you can't do if you have good friends by your side, and it always makes it easier to be brave, too. But I'll tell you more stories some other time," he said, because he could feel his throat getting clogged. "It's a beautiful day. Why don't you go play outside and enjoy it?"

She gave him a smacking kiss on the check, then bounced off the couch, all fire and energy and smiles. "Okay, Grandpa. I love you!" She scampered away, leaving the room sadder and colder.

The stories were old, and came pat to his tongue; he really had told them, or variants of them, to his sons when they had been small enough to believe them, and had repeated bits of them once his boys were old enough to understand the difference between a fairy tale and a lie.

They weren't lies, not really. No deceit was intended, and if he'd spun a fantasy or two so that his kids hadn't been forced to imagine their father being held captive, helpless and hungry, rotting away behind barbed wire until they were old enough to handle it, then he felt no need to apologize. The stories were the way the truth should have been.

He remembered the barrack as it really had been; a hundred square feet containing a cubic ton of misery. Thin straw palliasses that didn't deserve to be called mattresses and blankets that were more holes than fabric. There had to have been at _least_ a week or two where there wasn't frost on the windows, but he didn't remember any. And the food! If it didn't poison you outright, you wished it would.

And the people crammed in there with him… after a while, a lot of them started to blur and blend in his memory. Just an undifferentiated mass of anonymous boys with ragged uniforms and little to say, playing endless games of chess or checkers with improvised pieces on a hand-drawn board in a desperate attempt to make the time pass.

There were a few he remembered a bit more clearly. His first bunkmate had been an Englishman, the only one in the barracks, as it happened. He had an accent thick enough to spread on toast, a sense of humor that could take off a layer of skin, and a disconcerting smirk, as though he knew far more than he was telling. That was probably why there wasn't a soul in the barracks who wasn't convinced that he was doing _something _underhanded; either he was an informer or he was helping himself to other people's possessions, and probably both. No one had ever actually _caught_ him doing anything worse than drinking a bit more than his fair share of their ersatz coffee, but the suspicion persisted until the day he got himself shot trying to escape.

After that… well, there had been the kid from the sticks. Nice enough, although you could have held a flashlight to one ear and seen the beam shining out the other. He had a chipper, hail-fellow-well-met demeanor, and an unshakable optimism that nothing seemed able to squash out of him. You had to admire that, really, even when you wanted to shake him by the shoulders and demand that he face reality. He'd been sent to another camp in late '44; with any luck he'd made it home to the girl he'd left behind, but who knew for sure?

And like something out of a cartoon, the biggest guy in the barracks shared a bunk with the smallest. They were off in the corner where they wouldn't bother anyone; the barracks' official odd men out. The little guy was French; he didn't speak a word of English and he didn't want to learn, so by definition he wasn't much of a conversationalist. Mostly, they all ignored him, because he was unmistakably trying to ignore them. The big guy… well, he kept to himself, and for good reasons. There were a few prisoners who had violently objected to sharing quarters with him, and there was no reasoning with them on the subject. It had gotten pretty ugly by the end. Shame, really; the few times he'd tried to make friends, he'd seemed like a good guy, but, well… it was just the way things were, that was all. It had been a different time.

The barracks chief, their MOC, had done his best for them, credit where it was due; he was the one who kept order, tried to keep their spirits up, tried to make things easier for them any way he could. Silver-tongued and quick-witted, not to mention too damned stubborn to know when things were hopeless. He'd gone above and beyond, that was for sure. Occasionally, he was even able to sweet-talk the Kraut guards into looking the other way when some POW got stupid, which was pretty much miraculous. He'd also started planning out the construction of an escape tunnel—organizing teams of diggers, figuring out where they could scrounge lumber for braces, and, most complicated of all, dreaming up ways to dispose of the dirt. They hadn't gotten too far, but, looking back on it, maybe the actual tunnel was secondary. Just the _dream_ of the tunnel had done wonders for them all. It had reminded them of who and what they truly were, as opposed to what the camp wanted to warp them into. It had given the men some pride, some sense of purpose, some reason to wake up in the morning.

Some reason _not_ to sink into the near-catatonia that would have been so easy an escape from their situation. Some reason not to devolve into animals. Some reason not to despair. Not to die.

They'd needed reasons like that. God, how they'd needed them. There weren't many to find, not as the months passed and the endless war dragged on, as home started seeming less and less real, and more like something they'd seen in a half-remembered movie. And there were fewer still after the cholera epidemic that wiped out a fifth of the camp. Including their dynamo of an MOC.

What he had told his granddaughter was the unvarnished truth. He had made friends in the camp. Made them and lost them, and he knew that they were the main reason he had survived. Bravery really was easier when you weren't alone.

All of it was true, really. He wasn't lying and he wasn't delusional; he knew what had actually happened. He didn't deny the facts. But facts aren't always the same thing as truth. Sometimes they're the worst possible way to get at the truth, as it happens. And if he chose to remember the men with whom he'd shared the worst experience of his life the way he was sure they would have wanted to be remembered… he wasn't going to apologize for that, either.

They had been heroes. Honest-to-God heroes. And that was the only truth that mattered.

*.*.*.*.*.*

Author's note: AU, obviously. It is, perhaps, a more realistic description of what being held in a stalag might have been like. This does not make it true.

The title is from Oscar Wilde's poem 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol.'

I never saw a man who looked/ With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of bleu/ Which prisoners call the sky.


End file.
